Selectively detail-enhanced fusion of differently exposed images with moving objects.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an exposure fusion scheme for differently exposed images with moving objects. The proposed scheme comprises a ghost removal algorithm in a low dynamic range domain and a selectively detail-enhanced exposure fusion algorithm. The proposed ghost removal algorithm includes a bidirectional normalization-based method for the detection of nonconsistent pixels and a two-round hybrid method for the correction of nonconsistent pixels. Our detail-enhanced exposure fusion algorithm includes a content adaptive bilateral filter, which extracts fine details from all the corrected images simultaneously in gradient domain. The final image is synthesized by selectively adding the extracted fine details to an intermediate image that is generated by fusing all the corrected images via an existing multiscale algorithm. The proposed exposure fusion algorithm allows fine details to be exaggerated while existing exposure fusion algorithms do not provide such an option. The proposed scheme usually outperforms existing exposure fusion schemes when there are moving objects in real scenes. In addition, the proposed ghost removal algorithm is simpler than existing ghost removal algorithms and is suitable for mobile devices with limited computational resource.